Online credit card security- Desjardins Group and National Bank (for Canada)...
Desjardins Group (for example, Caisses Populaire Desjardins) and National Bank credit cards:
No address verification system (AVS) implemented by these organizations. As a result, myself and a number of other online vendors reject transactions using credit cards issued by these companies.
I am posting this as a result of a recent, rather large number of transactions that have been put through our online store system. Desjardins and National Bank credit cards, for whatever reason I have yet to have explained to me, do not have all the available online security measures implemented- the primary one being an Address Verification (this is where the address of a transaction is compared to the address on a credit card statement to ensure that the person purporting to be the cardholder at least knows the legitimate cardholder's address and that packages are shipped to the cardholder's address- not some empty warehouse in downtown Montreal). Virtually all Canadian banks utilize this system, excluding the two mentioned and a couple other, almost irrelevant card issuers (HSBC and a couple of the pre-paid card vendors). There is no good reason for this as implementing such online security features do not cost the bank/institution anything in respect to fees, and help to better protect both cardholders and online vendors.
Back to my situation- far too many transactions the last few days have come in with people attempting to use cards from these two institutions, all of which we have rejected as a result of the lack of security. There is no good reason why the banks could not/should not have implemented this, but I have no idea where to post such things so that anyone looking into things (preferably staff at these institutions) can find it. More and more online vendors are starting to reject transactions being put through on cards issued by these banks, and the banks seem to be completely ignorant of this- causing both vendors and their cardholders unnecessary grief and frustration.
If anyone from National Bank or any of the Desjardins Group comes across this post- the idea is- implement proper security features on your credit cards- not implementing these free features from Mastercard and Visa will ultimately hurt you as more vendors, and in turn your cardholders, get aggravated with the situation.
